JOY HECHT

ARTIST STATEMENT:

My work seeks to express the spirit of place in visual form.  I am fascinated by places, and respond to them as others might respond to music or perhaps to the beauty in faces or flowers.  When I travel, I am much less interested in "seeing the sights" than I am in "feeling" the space around me. That involves a combination of senses - visual perception of the compositions formed by buildings, streets, light, and open space; the patterns of pedestrians and vehicles moving through that space; the sounds of voices, vehicles, animals, water, and wind; the texture of building facades, geology, vegetation, and ocean; the smell of the air and in some places of water, food, garbage, or smoke; the scale, ranging from broad urban or coastal vistas to individual winding streets to single buildings. My work is representational, showing real places and working en plein air as much as possible. 

I work in collage, recycling papers from anywhere and everywhere; scraps from magazines, of course, but also musical scores, computer warranty booklets (great texture in the tiny text of unfamiliar alphabets!), old worn out file folders (lovely fuzzy texture), pages from the phone book, food packaging, maps, silver plumber's tape, and lots more. My materials form a palette of colors and textures; I never transplant images from other sources into my own work. At times I apply watercolor to my papers before using them, to get more diversity in the shades and textures I need to depict building facades, vegetation, sky, or water.  I do loose pencil sketches before beginning to apply my papers; shape them by cutting or tearing; and attach them with archival glue sticks that are practical for working on site. 

 I am also starting to explore several other media, quite unrelated to my collage. One is printing – drypoint and linocut at the moment.  For some reason I feel my prints should focus on the natural environment rather than cities, and particularly on shorelines and water.  I’m a birder, so I’m beginning with etchings of specific species that spend time on the coast and in the marshes.

The other is making fountains, something I’ve wanted to do for decades but only really put my mind to recently.  I want to use water and the sound of water to create an environment that people can walk into and through.  I’m starting by building “sketches” through which I can get a sense of how water flows through different shapes, the sounds it makes, the directions it moves, and so on.  Once I have a sense of that, and of what I like, I can start thinking about how I could actually build a fountain incorporating those shapes.  This is going to require me to learn to work with new materials, though I’m not yet sure what they are.  I’m guessing metal, though I’m also intrigued by both bamboo and glass.  I’ll figure that out when I get there!